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Web of Popularity, Achieved by Bullying

For many teenagers navigating the social challenges of high school, the ultimate goal is to become part of the “popular” crowd.

But new research suggests that the road to high school popularity can be treacherous, and that students near the top of the social hierarchy are often both perpetrators and victims of aggressive behavior involving their peers.

The latest findings, being published this month in The American Sociological Review, offer a fascinating glimpse into the social stratification of teenagers. The new study, along with related research from the University of California, Davis, also challenges the stereotypes of both high school bully and victim.

Highly publicized cases of bullying typically involve chronic harassment of socially isolated students, but the latest studies suggest that various forms of teenage aggression and victimization occur throughout the social ranks as students jockey to improve their status.

The findings contradict the notion of the school bully as maladjusted or aggressive by nature. Instead, the authors argue that when it comes to mean behavior, the role of individual traits is “overstated,” and much of it comes down to concern about status.

“Most victimization is occurring in the middle to upper ranges of status,” said the study’s author, Robert Faris, an assistant professor of sociology at U.C. Davis. “What we think often is going on is that this is part of the way kids strive for status. Rather than going after the kids on the margins, they might be targeting kids who are rivals.”

Educators and parents are often unaware of the daily stress and aggression with which even socially well-adjusted students must cope.

“It may be somewhat invisible,” Dr. Faris said. “The literature on bullying has so focused on this one dynamic of repeated chronic antagonism of socially isolated kids that it ignores these other forms of aggression. It’s entirely possible that one act, one rumor spread on the Internet could be devastating.”

In a series of studies, some still awaiting publication, the U.C. Davis researchers asked 3,722 eighth to 10th graders in three counties in North Carolina to name their five best friends. Then the students were asked whether they had ever been a target of aggressive behavior by their peers — including physical violence, verbal abuse and harassment, rumors and gossip, or ostracism — and whether they had engaged in such behavior themselves.

The researchers used the data to construct complex social maps of the schools, tracking groups of friends and identifying the students who were consistently at the hub of social life. “It’s not simply the number of friends the kid has, it’s who their friends are,” Dr. Faris said. “The kids we’re talking about are right in the middle of things.”

Using the maps, the researchers tracked the students most often accused of aggressive behavior. They found that increases in social status were associated with subsequent increases in aggression. But notably, aggressive behavior peaked at the 98th percentile of popularity and then dropped.

“At the very top you start to see a reversal — the kids in the top 2 percent are less likely to be aggressive,” Dr. Faris said. “The interpretation I favor is that they no longer need to be aggressive because they’re at the top, and further aggression could be counterproductive, signaling insecurity with their social position.

“It’s possible that they’re incredibly friendly and everybody loves them and they were never mean, but I’m not so convinced by that, because there are so many kids right behind them in the hierarchy who are highly aggressive.”

Over all, the research shows that about a third of students are involved in aggressive behavior. In another paper presented last year, Dr. Faris reported that most teenage aggression is directed at social rivals — “maybe one rung ahead of you or right beneath you,” as he put it, “rather than the kid who is completely unprotected and isolated.”

“It’s not to say those kids don’t get picked on, because they do,” he said. “But the overall rate of aggression seems to increase as status goes up. What it suggests is that a student thinks they get more benefit to going after somebody who is a rival.”

The research offers a road map for educators struggling to curb bullying and aggression both inside and outside of school. One option may be to enlist the support of students who aren’t engaged in bullying — those at the very top of the social ladder, and the two-thirds who don’t bully.

Richard Gallagher, director of the Parenting Institute at the New York University Child Study Center, said the research added to a growing body of scientific literature documenting the role that popularity plays in aggressive teasing and bullying behavior.

“It does highlight that it’s a typical behavior that’s used in establishing social networks and status,” said Dr. Gallagher, an associate professor of child and adolescent psychiatry. “Schools and parents need to be tuned into this as a behavior that occurs all the time. It means that school districts need to have policies that deal with this, and I think it means also that we need to turn to the adolescents for some of the solutions.”

Dr. Gallagher said that although results had been mixed, some research showed that schools could reduce bullying and aggression by enlisting the help of students as well as administrators.

“It’s not likely to eliminate it completely, but it’s likely to decrease its occurrence,” he said. “The programs that have been successful are the ones that get kids to stop being passive bystanders who go along with teasing or bullying. Efforts have been made to get the popular kids to say, ‘This is not cool.’ ”

Dr. Faris said he planned to conduct new research that would match the social maps with yearbooks to better document a school’s social hierarchy. A related study, he added, also suggests that it’s not just popularity that influences aggressive behavior, but how much the student cares about being popular.

“Historically, all the attention has been on the mental health deficiencies of the bullies,” he said. “We need to direct more attention to how aggression is interwoven into the social fabric of these schools.”

My own personal experience has always found that kids who bully are often raised by bullies. Parents set the tone on how people should be treated. Kids watch how their parents treat their families, co-workers, and friends from a young age. Maybe the 1/3 who bully do it because they see their parents engage in aggressive behavior. The difference aside from age is that we call adult bullies by an entirely different name…one that has do with the hole in your rectum.

Don’t you just love it when expensive studies and intricately worded academic writing make a big deal of telling the public something that’s been painfully obvious for decades? It’s like chocolate cake to me.

By the time I finished this article I wasn’t sure if I was reading about kids in high school, or adults in (many) workplaces.

Humans compete, and compete hard. Men and women, young and old. At all ages, across all walks of life, and in all social settings. Maybe not all compete equally hard, or often (as the researchers say, around only 30% of the teens bully), but everyone has to compete some of the time.

The line between fair and sanctioned ‘competition’ and ‘bullying’ can become blurred quite fast.

So now researchers have determined that in addition to ‘traditional’ bullying that singles out a person on the fringe, other forms of bullying occur in high schools, bullying that involves ‘rivals’ close to one another on the social ladder.

What would it take to minimize this all-too-human behavior among kids, assuming one wants to?

Probably the same things that it takes to minimize it in the work place (changes that are rare there, and will remain rare in school settings): the creation of very small, personal, well-run schools, that foster individual achievement and recognize all levels of contribution, with clearly and fairly defined and enforced pathways to reward and recognition.

I do not believe that the apparent rise in bullying (ie harshly competitive behavior) that we see among teens can be separated from the profoundly stressful, competitive, and achievement-obsessed world large typical high schools have become in recent years.

Finally, a halfway sensible analysis of bullying. The evidence is that teenagers bully for the same reasons that adults bully! Yes, adults bully too. We call it office politics, professional backstabbing, housewives gossiping. We created a society that is cutthroat competitive where you get ahead by crushing your competitors, and playing dirty turns out to be a great way to get ahead.

1. Mary Stolz made the observation that the girls at the top of the popularity ladder are not as mean as the ones just below in her book “The Seagulls Woke Me” in 1951. Still a great book.

2. I would like to see whether the researchers found that these trends changed at all from age group to age group or between boys and girls. I’d be surprised if the trends were uniform in all groups of youngsters.

3. I never read about kids like myself in these studies. I was bullied a lot in elementary school and junior high, but in high school I sort of “opted out” of the popularity contest, and either the kids stopped bullying me, or I stopped paying attention. I know “just ignore them” (which is what my mom always advised) is not easy, or even possible in some cases, but I’d like to see whether it can ever be a replicable part of a solution.

I think one critical step might be to stop referring to the kids at the top of the social heap as “popular.” That word connotes being universally liked — and as any high school student will tell you, being likeable and being high-status don’t necessarily correlate.

I think this bully stuff is just nuts. I just try to teach our kid to be herself and just be a floater and not let herself get sucked into this madness. It seems to me that the girls – I can’t speak for boys here – who bully have mothers who are the same way or mothers who have unresolved issues regarding their high school experience so they have to replay it out through their daughters.

The one thing I think this opinion lacks is a historical perspective. My experience in high school, years back, was that students who were aggressive or bullying were reprimanded and ‘sent to the principal’.

That was a big deal in those days, as that generally meant a call to parents. It was an embarrassment and something to be avoided.

I agree with Anne that children learn their behavior, to a large extent, from their parents. I’m stunned sometimes to see family interactions on tv, where parents watch an older child bullying a younger one, a girl belittling her brother and vice versa. And it goes ahead, as if there is no problem, as if that is something completely normal. ‘Kids will be kids’ mentality?

Obnoxious, unthinking parents generally have unruly, thoughtless children. Loving parents who take time to patiently explain what bad behavior is, and how to avoid it, are far more likely to have happy children who won’t feel a need to demonstrate an archaic ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality.

High School Student Here.
As a current student, I see this research as proof of what I’ve always suspected to be the case: the real friction occurs in the 50-75th percentile of popularity.
It’s not the bottom of the class that feels the real burden of the bullying. Rather, the kids in the middle care most about improving their social status, and as a result they fight it out both verbally and physically.
Worst of all, the pressure to bully rises naturally as popularity goes up–trust me, I’ve acted like a pretty awful human being just to make myself look good in the eyes of others.
Does this make me a bad person? Maybe. Does it make me human? Absolutely. Most importantly: can anything be done to halt the bullying? I hope so, but my school has spent thousands of dollars on anti-bullying campaigns–and they just don’t seem to work.

Please– this is a surprise?! Decades ago kids who wanted desparately to be popular attacked others they were afraid might be competitors. It may be better documented now with the opportunities of the Internet, but really, it is not anything new!

High school is four years out of your entire life. I had a terrible four years, but honestly — who cares? People grow up and move on. Cruelty is pretty much a constant, whether it comes from teenagers or adults. Part of living in the real world is learning how to deal with it. A vast majority of the kids who are tormented in high school go on to lead normal lives. It took me awhile to learn that pain is not forever, but it was a lesson worth learning.

My son is now in 6th grade, and over his school years, my observation of his social trials seems to lend some credence to this theory. I think it has a lot to do with pecking order- if you’re seen with one social group, and you try to move ‘up’, you will probably face a challenge, including snarky behavior and beyond, from those on the fringes of that group who feel threatened of challenged by you.

My son recently tried sitting at a different lunch table with the most popular boys. The most well liked one was nice and friendly, but his minions around him were sarcastic and territorial, and kept pushing back at my son, with biting sarcasm and other taunts. Finally, he just gave up, and moved back to another group of boys who accepted him again without a fuss.

I wonder how this “who does he/she think she is?” kind of behavior plays out. Someone who is filed away as a “D-List” can become a challenge as they try to move up the pecking order..

Unfortunately, we are still so threatened by that fear of being shunned by our peers and communities, that I think it can lead us to perpetrate and tolerate cruel behavior.

I am still trying to teach my kids to follow the golden rule, but it’s a jungle out there…

Surveys and yearbooks are great, but how about looking into these kids’ online activities? A lot of them must be on Facebook…could researchers could get access (with permission, of course) to what they’re doing there? Doing so might provide a goldmine of information on fluid social networks that’s not biased by self-reporting, as well as a detailed picture of e-bullying as it happens.

How can you tell that they are choosing these behaviors in order to get ahead? Perhaps the higher up the ladder you go, the more able you are to get away with negative behavior, so it becomes more tempting.

To varying degrees of intensity, this culture, or sub-culture, exists in every school, everywhere. It’s as old a Cain and Abel.

It is beyond naïve to think that bully’s of any ilk are predominantly a result of bad parenting or bully-like parents. (though it can sometimes be the case) And it is also beyond naïve to believe that the bully’s are a simple product of conditioning… and that they don’t really know what they’re doing.

Some of the worst bully’s that I saw over all of my school years had great parents; parents who were highly involved and who closely monitored there kid(s). The type of parents that wouldn’t tolerate the bullying… if it came to their attention. Parents that were great providers, role-models, and often with the mom at home and not required to work. Parents that didn’t spoil their kid(s) and who set standards high for behavior and academics.

Good parenting is an obvious given, in the equation of raising a decent human-being.… but it certainly isn’t a guarantee of that result. A preponderance of children of both genders, when unsupervised, will bully, and do bully, if they can. Your little darling, who in front of you is an angel… becomes Attila the Hun behind your back.

There will always be a hierarchy, and jockeying for position by some. There’s no stopping it. Kids will survive it without much difficulty… or at least get over it.

But then there’s the dangerous bullying. Daily intimidation, threats, beatings, and humiliation.

This bully understands intimidation, fear, and pain… from the giving end. Enjoys it and basks in it. And this bully may cause irreparable harm either physically, psychologically, or both… to “your” child. At this point, the psycho-babble of why the bully became a bully, etc, etc… should be irrelevant to you where your child’s safety is concerned. Don’t wait for the APA to fix it.

Fear may not necessarily address the root cause of the bully’s bullying, (sometimes it‘s just malicious human nature, in my opinion… and not a specific result of bullying parents)… but it just might save “your” bullied child a great deal of…”torture”.

Simply stated… the dangerous ones have to be stopped. Basically, the dangerous bully type should know for true, that if he/she is caught beating and terrorizing others, the result will be removal from society and real-deal corporal punishment… that will instill within them a healthy fear and respect for dad, societal expectations, and for the consequences of their bullying behavior.

If they know that this is going to be the result every time that they get caught bullying in school… or in cyberspace… most will self-govern their actions. And if that’s what it takes for a parent to rein in their bully… so be it… and I commend the parents that do. Better this avenue, than “you” having to sit with a plastic surgeon or mortician discussing the fate of “your” tortured child.

But we all know that this means to the end is no longer politically correct. Don’t we? And the clever boys and girls know it too. Parents are hamstrung… and must turn to the “experts”… who will diagnose, and prescribe. And the clever boys and girls know this too.

Poor modern parents! No longer kings and queens of their castles… but now ruled by untouchable princes and princesses who have learned the art of bullying the king and queen.

This does not end in high school. Do the same study in corporate life and you’ll find the same patterns. The backstabbing, clawing and viciousness continue — except the stakes, arguably, are much higher. Those who play it well in high school probably play it well later.